Latika Bourke

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says nuclear energy remains an option for Australia, describing it as an "obvious direction" as it considers how to cut carbon dioxide emissions after 2020.

Ms Bishop called for a an open discussion about the feasibility of nuclear power, given Australia's abundance of uranium, but accused Labor of resorting to a scare campaign when the issue was raised during the Howard government years.

"It's an obvious conclusion that if you want to bring down your greenhouse gas emissions dramatically you have to embrace a form of low or zero-emissions energy and that's nuclear, the only known 24/7 baseload power supply with zero emissions," she told Fairfax Media when asked about Australia's options for reaching future carbon-reduction targets.

Ms Bishop flies to Lima, Peru, in just over a week to attend the annual United Nations climate conference, where Australia will face pressure to announce its climate targets for beyond 2020 and it's understood the Prime Minster has personally requested Trade Minister Andrew Robb chaperone Ms Bishop so he can factor in the economic impacts of any new targets Australia considers. Mr Robb, with three major trade deals under his belt, was due to be in South America at the time. Mr Robb was instrumental in influencing the coalition partyroom against former Leader Malcolm Turnbull and his support for Labor's emissions trading scheme.

But new pressure has mounted on Australia in the wake of a recent agreement between the US and China, designed to build momentum for an international treaty due to be struck in Paris in December 2015.

The Liberal deputy leader said without a zero emissions baseload power source, Australia's reduction effort would rely on the 2020 renewable energy target – which the Government is attempting to cut – research and making the energy supply smarter and more efficient.

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"I always thought that we needed to have a sensible debate about all potential energy sources and, given that Australia has the largest source of uranium, it's obvious that we should at least debate it," she said.

The Liberal Party and its base strongly supports considering nuclear power, but the Coalition has avoided reviving the debate until now. Ms Bishop lamented the result of a 2006 review, commissioned when she was science minister.

"The debate didn't go anywhere. It descended into name calling about which electorates I intended to place a nuclear reactor in, and would I rule out Cottesloe Beach – that kind of puerile debate. So it didn't ever get off the ground," she said.

Dr Switkowski praised Ms Bishop's comments and said "nuclear power simply has to be in the mix in Australia's energy future" given its negligible carbon footprint and Australia's geological stability.

"It's a big call for our leaders to engage in this debate, but a good one because it will take some time for communities and industries to get comfortable again with the current and future generations of nuclear technology," he said.

It's a big call for our leaders to engage in this debate, but a good one because it will take some time for communities and industries to get comfortable again with the current and future generations of nuclear technology

Dr Switkowski said community sentiment towards nuclear power had been warming in Australia until the Fukushima disaster in 2011.

But he said advances in small modular reactors could make nuclear commercially viable for Australia as early as next decade because they addressed the main concerns people typically held about reactors – waste, their proximity to population centres and the risk of a catastrophic accident.

"The small modular reactors will provide a real opportunity to consider nuclear power again because they are a tenth of the size of a nuclear or coal-fired powered station," he said.

But he agreed that if there were improvements in wind and solar technology over the next two decades to make them more reliable around the clock, renewable energy sources could be more viable than nuclear. "It's a bit of a race, given the time that's been lost due to Fukushima," he said.

The government is likely to increase its uranium trade to China and India, and has in the past sold the resource to Russia.

Mr Bishop said: "Other countries are embracing nuclear power as part of their energy mix in order to meet the kind of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that is being considered.

"France is considered as one of the greenest countries on earth [and] has a significant proportion of its energy from nuclear energy."